The basic objective of the proposed study is to gain further understanding of the process of white suburbanization, and the units of analysis are Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas with 1970 populations of 100,000 or more. Special emphasis is given to systematically evaluating the so called "flight hypothesis" -- the idea that whites are "fleeing" to the suburbs of central cities to get away from the latter's problems, especially racial tensions, violence, and "forced" school desegregation. A part of this will involve comparison of the effects of variables representing the "flight" perspective with other variables known to affect suburbanization so as to estimate the importance of the former in relative as well as absolute terms. Another objective is to integrate variables from the "flight" perspective with these other variables into a more general theoretical framework and evaluate these with appropriate statistical models. Several dimensions of white suburbanization are examined on the assumption that distinct groups are involved in the process, each of which may respond to different variables, or to the same variables in different ways. Regarding methodology, a key part of the analysis will be creation of indexes of racial tension for each city; the data for these indexes will come from newspaper indexes and published Census and other reports. Factor analysis will be one of the tools used to create the indexes. Different versions of multiple regression analysis will be used to evaluate the various hypotheses, including step-wise regression and structural equation models. Emphasis will be given to the creation of variables which represent changes in structural characteristics of metropolitan areas, as well as absolute levels of variables.